In Public

This essay considers public reading—the act of reading, performed in public, of public notices, inscriptions, labels, banners, and advertisements, which makes the experience of modern life a state of incessant address. Examples are taken from Dickens’s Bleak House and Joyce’s Ulysses, with particular attention being paid to the treatment given to advertising through skywriting in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Many of the forms of public inscription or announcement borrow or blend with forms of mechanical motion, which is anticipated in the device known as “The Readies” invented by Bob Brown in the early 1930s. The essay concludes with a discussion of the growing expressiveness of and sensitivity to typefaces, especially in the psychotypographic force possessed by capital letters.

Tracked

How do technologies track our reading? Digital devices today can monitor not only what you read electronically, but when, where, and for how long. From an artist’s book by Heather Weston and eighteenth-century commonplacing techniques to Kindle Highlights and social reading sites like GoodReads, this chapter takes a wide-ranging, playful look at the ways both humans and machines have used various platforms to track their reading over time. By critically examining the deep history of social reading practices, this chapter aims to bring into relief what is new or different about emerging digital technologies and the forms of reading they foster.

Mental Representation

Book history, media studies, and digital humanities have foregrounded the physical medium of texts and have shown special interest in the rise of digital media. This essay acknowledges the value of these disciplines but also points to their limitations as sites for analyzing reading. Scholars should not draw conclusions about reception based on a work’s medium of presentation. The comprehension process, as described in cognitive psychology, provides a powerful alternative for understanding reading; psychologists have argued for the existence of general comprehension skills that operate across media. Whatever the origin of a text, comprehension occurs in the same medium, the mind of the reader. The study of reading in the humanities needs to separate itself from the disciplines with which it is usually associated (book history and media studies) because these mask critical aspects of the reading process.

In the Classroom

Modern pedagogy presumes that students require preparation for literacy training, often easing them into reading by way of pictures and song. Earlier modes of pedagogy from the Middle Ages until relatively recently proceeded much more quickly, teaching students with sentences and short texts from the start. There was an emotional cost to this speed, as early schoolbooks acknowledged in the very violence they embrace. But examining this difference in approach closely also makes clear that modern classrooms rely on prior knowledge more than they admit, and, also, that the pace of modern teaching only serves to conceal the difficult but nearly unteachable cognitive leap that may well be the essential step in to learning to read.

Deafness

This chapter describes deaf experiences of reading, particularly those that occur in signed languages. It explores both visual and tactile methods of signed language reading and analyzes the ways these practices enable alternative theorizations of reading and its potentials as well as the reasons that referring to the processes of decoding signed language utterances as reading is appropriate. Specifically, it focuses on the implications of encountering the human body as text and the relationships between human subjects and language that become possible in such contexts through readings of several ASSL poems including Bernard Bragg’s “Flowers and Moonlight on Spring Water” and “The Pilot and the Eagle,” Ian Sanborn’s “Caterpillar,” and Ayisha Knight-Shaw’s “Until.”

Aurality

The author recounts her history as an aural reader and argues for her preference for the synthesized voices of text-to-speech technology over analogue recordings of human voices. Legally blind since the age of 11, she developed habits of good listening, which served to elevate her aural reading from the passive reception of oral language to a more active practice of aural discernment. Now, with the widespread popularity of audio books and the ubiquity of synthesized voice technologies in mainstream electronic devices, she perceives progress toward greater social inclusion for people who are blind and visually impaired.

Postcritical

“Postcritical reading” slices across the dichotomy of sceptical detachment versus naïve absorption. Rather than interrogating what a text represents or fails to represent, it invites other questions: what does a text do? what does it set in motion? what ties a text to its readers? Such questions can do justice to the work of literature—the work that literature does, in the classroom and the world—while also leaving room for contingency and surprise. And here the language of attachment offers an alternative to the usual accounts (whether aesthetic or sociological) of why literature matters. Attachment, it should be emphasized, is not just a matter of feeling; it is also normative, involving questions of ethics or politics. In this sense, it allows us to look more closely at the similarities between academic criticism and lay reading, yet without denying their differences.

In Ancient Rome

The history of reading in antiquity is wholly dependent on literary sources that must be read with care; one misinterpreted passage can enable an entire misguided history. This is the case with Augustine’s account of Ambrose reading silently, and the tenacious misapprehension that such reading was impossible in antiquity. Another reading of the passage points not to reading’s physical mechanics but to its psychological unknowability, and the distance that reading creates between subjects whether in the same room or at a historical distance. This should prompt us to consider other unknowable or invisible aspects of ancient Roman reading, like its dependence on enslaved labor, ubiquitous but almost never described. The unknowability of ancient reading invites us to consider its cultural idiosyncrasy; that idiosyncrasy, in turn, provides exciting new points of contact with our current age of digital reading.

Actual

As opposed to other things one does or can do with text, its “actual reading” is defined here as the actualization of scriptive (hence phonetic) signals in the construction of its aesthetic as well as semantic force. The silent sounding of literary letters is the base-line of textual generation, thrown into relief by contrast with a parodic story by American novelist Bennett Sims about a film scholar’s willful and absurd lip reading of silent background players in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. This satirized overreading of phonic shapes is then entered into the famous terms of debate between Paul de Man and Michael Riffaterre on what “really reading” means, to which, after their fraught example from Victor Hugo, further literary examples from Charles Dickens through Virginia Woolf to Adrienne Rich are recruited to help arbitrate.

Interfaced

This essay discusses the flexibility of the term “interface” and argues that an approach that draws from media studies, literature, and the arts provides a unique perspective to work with and against the grain of contemporary, ubiquitous, nearly invisible interfaces to (frequently) blackboxed digital technologies; media studies and literature and the arts can reveal the ways in which these interfaces too often foreclose on our access to information, knowledge, and creativity, and they can also re-insert values such as accessibility, transparency, and configurability, if not into the design of interfaces themselves, then at least into our experience of these interfaces.